50K homeless in NYC shelters nightly, report says

Published 9:18 pm, Tuesday, March 5, 2013

NEW YORK — More than 50,000 homeless people a night — the most in decades — are now in New York City's homeless shelters, a spike that mirrors an overall increase that was the largest among the nation's cities last year, according to a report released Tuesday.

Homelessness has been a troubling and contentious aspect of life the nation's biggest city for decades. But it has become an escalating crisis in recent years, amid a chronic shortage of affordable housing and an unemployment rate higher than state and national levels.

"The state of homelessness in New York City has never been worse," at least since the Great Depression, said the coalition's president, Mary Brosnahan.

Advocates for the homeless portrayed the rising shelter population as the result of failures by a mayor who pledged to reduce homelessness by two-thirds; instead, the shelter numbers have risen at nearly that same rate since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002.